Engineering Manager - ML Platform

Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: Holborn Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1N 2HT
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Sainsbury's Tech
Closing date: 22 March 2025
Requisition ID: 294665

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you’ll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We’ve made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.

Joining Sainsbury's Tech means becoming part of an inclusive and driven team that is passionate about creating innovative solutions. As an Engineering Manager, you will play a pivotal role in leading and coaching talented engineering teams, driving the delivery of impactful solutions that drive efficiency and enhance performance across the business. With a focus on continuous improvement, you will have the opportunity to shape a world-class engineering function and contribute to the development of cutting-edge processes and technologies. At Sainsbury's, we value collaboration, diversity, and inclusivity, and offer a supportive and inspiring environment where you can make a purposeful contribution.

About the Team

You'll lead a multi-skilled engineering team at Sainsbury’s, where we lead the development and management of our new Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning platform.

What you'll do

1. Own and evolve a newly built ML Ops platform on Microsoft Azure, supporting the full ML lifecycle—from data sourcing & feature engineering to training, deployment, and real-time serving.
2. Architect scalable, secure, and cost-effective solutions, making key build vs. buy decisions to maximise business impact.
3. Drive innovation, delivering new AI/ML capabilities such as graph neural networks and LLM Ops.
4. Oversee the migration & modernisation of existing ML models into a unified strategic stack.
5. Enable multiple cross-functional teams of data scientists and ML engineers, supporting AI-driven automation across the business —from personalisation to logistics optimisation.
6. Own the end-to-end delivery and operations of the platform, balancing feature development with production stability.
7. Collaborate with Product teams to define and prioritise AI/ML capabilities, ensuring delivery at pace and to a high standard.
8. Build a brand-new high-performing engineering team, hiring diverse talent while leveraging third-party resources where needed.
9. Define the technical vision for AI & ML Engineering at Sainsbury’s, embedding best practices across the organisation.
10. Champion agile/lean delivery, oversee budgets, and manage service support and SLAs.

Who you are

1. A passionate and experienced leader with a deep understanding of the role AI & ML plays in retail success.
2. A strategic technical expert with hands-on experience in ML Engineering & DevOps, delivering and operating large-scale platforms.
3. Skilled in cloud architecture (Azure or AWS a plus), data pipelines, stream processing, and real-time analytics.
4. A people-first leader who can hire, develop, and retain top talent while fostering an inclusive and high-performing culture.
5. A champion of modern engineering practices, bringing cutting-edge tools and methodologies to improve team efficiency and innovation.
6. A results-driven problem solver with strong financial acumen, ensuring investments deliver maximum value.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits.

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).

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